A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country, from the author of Nevada Days.Bernardo Atxaga's Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle's bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He's been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a river in the forest, he'll recover his speech. As the years pass, those twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region, and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after them.Water over Stones is similar in nature to Atxaga's earlier books Obabakoak and The Accordionist's Son, as it weaves in themes of friendship, nature, and death. Yet in capturing a span of time from...

A seductive, unclassifiable blend of autobiography and fiction set in Reno, from the preeminent Basque authorNine months as a writer in residence can prove unnerving for anyone. For Bernardo Atxaga, newly arrived with his wife and two daughters, research at the Center for Basque Studies in Reno, Nevada, is anything but straightforward. The neon lights and harsh, windswept desert appear full of ominous signs: A raccoon that watches the house at night, eyes glowing. A series of sexual assaults on campus by an unknown assailant. A spider scuttling endlessly in a glass jar kept by a colleague. And the kidnapping and murder of a young college girl in the house next door.Fragments of the Basque diaspora appear everywhere: A photo of the heavyweight boxer Paulino Uzcudun, who fought Max Baer in the 1930s. The funeral of a Basque sheepherder. Daily life also turns up some unusual characters—a university friend suspected of involvement in the assaults on...

"A brilliantly inventive writer ... he understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildy funny."--A.S. ByattObabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial collection about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic Basque village. A schoolboy's miningengineer father tricks him into growing up, an unfortunate environmentalist rescues deceptively harmless lizards, and a rescue mission on a Swiss mountain-climbing expedition in Nepal turns into murder. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, while everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page. Hints of darker undercurrents mingle with moments of wry humor in this dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts, and literary theory, all held together by Bernardo Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice. An unforgettable work from an international literary giant, whom The Observer...